The round house by Lousie Eldrich

This book is set in 1988, but the tangle of laws that hinder prosecution of rape cases on many reservations still exists. “Maze of Injustice,” a 2009 report by Amnesty International, included the following statistics: 1 in 3 Native women will be raped in her lifetime (and that figure is certainly higher as Native women often do not report rape); 86 percent of rapes and sexual assaults upon Native women are perpetrated by non-Native men; few are prosecuted.

The novel “The round house“, set in Nord Dakota and near a native americans reservation, begins talking about a tragic theme: the rape of native women.

The main character’s mother undergoes a sexual assault, the shock of the experience makes hard the reconstruction and the woman will close herself up trying to overcome the tragic memory.

Her husband, a judge, and her son Joe will try to find out the culprit in order to have justice.

The theme is interesting as the setting within a less known reality – the native americans one – the novel describes a different way of living and various characters.

The thing I did not like is the writing style: everything is filtered by Joe’s POV – dialogues included – and the reading experience was somewhat burdened by this. Another aspect I did not find completely believable is the way of acting of the main character, some actions were quite extreme considering his age, but maybe this is not due to my lack of knowledge about the context.